Companies Build “Capabilities” Before They Build “Moats”

The problem with that is true defensibility purely at the product level is really rare in the Valley, because there are a lot of really good engineers. And there are new ones every day, whether they’re coming out of Stanford or coming in from other countries or whatever. And then there’s the issue of leap-frogging. The next team has the opportunity

The more defensible a startup’s core offering, the less likely it is that the competition will harm it in the future.

Only 38 percent of companies in the random group had engineering defensibility, a statistic that shows an increased likelihood of success when there’s engineering complexity. Engineering alone, however, is often not enough. Many companies coupled engineering defensibility with other types of moats. About 28 percent of the billion-dollar startups ha